Various postage services have determined that it would be convenient to serve the public with means to purchase postage stamps through an automatic teller machine or ATM.
The postage stamp itself is a rather complex device. To meet current user demands it must be constructed of a face material or backing capable of accepting high quality printing of complex design stable under a variety of environmental conditions and provide an ink cancelable surface, on which cancellation ink dries rapidly, and which is removable from its adhesive to meet the needs of stamp collectors. In addition to being cancelable it should have at its surface means to detect the stamp so that a properly stamped envelope can be cancelled in an automated cancellation machine.
Traditionally, a postage stamp has been manufactured with a water soluble adhesive. It has been the desire of the postal service to, no only convert the adhesive to a self-adhesive or pressure sensitive adhesive, but to also present the postage stamps, as part of a laminate construction, which is dispensable from an automatic teller machine.
An automatic teller machine is designed to dispense currency. Any postage stamp construction to be dispensable must be dispensable as a laminate of an array of stamps serving as the facestock or backing, an interlayer of a self- or pressure-sensitive adhesive and a continuous release liner which protects the adhesive until the stamps are peeled therefrom and still provide performance characteristics which simulate the currency from which the ATM was configured to dispense.
No characteristic of the classic postage stamp can be sacrificed, yet the laminate must behave like currency in an automatic teller machine, otherwise the ATM will not dispense the product.
The first attempt at an automatic teller machine dispensable stamp construction consisted of an array of postage stamps formed of a taggant coated polyester laminated to an acrylic based adhesive which was in turn laminated to a polyester based release liner. This arrangement did not meet with public acceptance in the United States. The reason was attributed to the environmentally unfriendly nature of its polyester facestock.
A second version featured a 45 pound clear overcoated paper facestock and paper release liner. Because of several problems, including thickness of the construction and tendency of the adhesive to edge ooze, the second version could not be reliably dispensed from an automatic teller machine, and was predominantly sold over the counter.
The third version was identical to the second version but uncoated. Although sold through ATM's on a limited basis it did dispense reliably.
We have sought to overcome the problems of our prior constructions by providing a postage stamp construction which would reliably dispense from an ATM and offer high quality postage stamps that would meet the needs of stamp collectors.